Gremma's Travels: Hello France! Cute Little Riquewhir

There was an obvious change the instant we drove over the Rhine and into France. In Germany the roads were so well maintained. They were super smooth, and all the verges were neat, tidy and free of rubbish. And you can drive really fast on the autobahn. Coming into France, the roads were the opposite. It was still beautiful countryside, but the roads were rough, there was a fair amount of rubbish (not a lot, just in comparison to Germany) and the max speed was 130 which felt super slow to us by now.

Beautiful Riquewihr. Pretty much all that green is vines.

Our Street

Riquewihr is such a beautiful town, and you can easily see why it makes all the lists of the prettiest towns in the world. Such a gorgeous walled old town, surrounded by vines. It gets pretty busy during the day with a massive influx of people coming in on big tour buses, but once the sun starts going down and they all leave it is very peaceful.

We stayed at a cute little hotel called Le Sarment d'Or right in the old town, with a view out on to one of the pretty little back streets.

Another thing we noticed as soon as we hit France was that the number of locals speaking English was a lot less than in Germany, however the number of English speaking tourists was a much higher, with lots of Americans around. We hadn't noticed many English speaking tourists at all in Germany.

We met up with Nick in Riquewihr, and spent the our first afternoon in among the Grand Cru vines above the town. We took a picnic up there with pretzels (still super close to Germany), amazing meats and cheeses, and of course foie gras. Delicious! All topped off with an incredible view. The town was laid out before us, with vines as far as the eye could see in every direction.

Riquewihr rooftops

Picnic above Riquewihr

Cheers! (with the smallest glass in the world!)

Picnic in front of the Grand Cru grapes

The makings of a picnic

Foie gras anyone??

Riquewihr streets with the Grand Cru vines in the background

First taste of frogs legs - delicious

Foie gras

Making the beef tartare at our table

The completed tartare

Nicks burger - yup that's a layer of foie gras on there

The majority of our time in Riquewhir was spent biking through the vineyards (which will get it's own post). We did have some time to explore the town, but not as much as I would have liked. There were lots of wine caves on the outskirts we didn't visit, and some really cute little shops too. Our saying for this trip has become "I wish we had one more day!"

The best place we ate was our hotel restaurant on the last night. The food was divine, and it was pretty special having frogs legs for the first time (yum!) and also having tartare prepared at our table. After dinner we took a bottle of wine back up into the vineyards again, and relaxed in among the grapes overlooking the town. A great way to end our few days in Riquewihr. The boys felt pretty good too, contributing to the 2014 harvest by taking a leak in among the Grand Cru vines!

It was good fun having Nick with us. The boys had a couple of big drinking nights, while I quite happily took myself off to bed and relaxed.